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I live alone and I don’t usually get visitors. The last time I had a visitor in my room was when I went back to Singapore for a week and came back to a snake wrapped comfortably around my air-con pipes.

This evening I was minding my own business in my room when I heard some sort of a clinking sound going on outside in my living room. I didn’t really think much about it nor was I bothered by the noise, but it was going on for almost an hour so I decided to check it out.

Looked up and saw what seemed like a thousand flying ants/termites swarming around my fluorescent ceiling lights. I’m not the kind who gets easily traumatized or easily creeped out, but this was pretty traumatizing! I quickly switched off all my lights and opened the front door, hoping to divert them to the corridor lights. I think I counted only 6 flew out of my room, there must still be a thousand left inside!

With goosebumps all over my body, I grabbed my laptop, wallet and phone, and ran out of my apartment.

What I saw downstairs was worst! If what I described in my room was a swarm, I think I saw the entire cloud of them downstairs.

I took shelter at a restaurant near my neighborhood, and searched the internet for help. Some forums were suggesting that they could be termites looking for somewhere to settle in, or maybe just some misguided insects thinking that the lights in my room was the light from the moon.

Whatever the case, I spent about 2 hours hiding in the restaurant before they were closing and I had to return home. I braced myself for the worst as I made my way back.

As I reached the foot of my apartment, the cloud of flying bastards seemed to have disappeared. Just a handful of them still hovering around the corridor lights, and a couple of stray dogs sleeping peacefully beneath. What happened?

I made my way to my front door and was praying really hard that my nightmare would be gone as soon as I switched on the lights, and I guess my prayer worked.

Not sure how they came, but no idea how they left too. A lot of abandoned wings on the floor, a couple of them dead in the toilet, and otherwise, less than 10 of them still crawling around but was easily cleaned up with a broom.

A friend of mine updated his Facebook status to pay tribute to one of his friends who passed away today.

Out of sheer curiosity, I clicked on the Facebook profile of the deceased. His account was public so I could see most of his stuff.

Apparently, he had stage 5 cancer and was coping under a lot of morphine. Just 3 weeks ago, his Facebook status read “Hi everyone, sadly I don’t have much time left” and he invited all of his friends to visit him as he is giving away most of his stuff.

I am quite sure most of us have not arrived at that stage where we can admit that our days are numbered, and acknowledge that there are a lot of material possessions that we can’t take with us on our next journey, and hence give everything away.

None of us will ever be able to understand that feeling. While I don’t know the deceased personally, from what I read from his Facebook profile, I could tell it took him a great deal of courage to accept the terms of his fate and actually made good use of his last days – Inviting all of his friends, meeting them up for the last time, and giving his stuff away to them.

We can’t really choose when or how we will die, but if I ever have the chance to throw a farewell like this, I think I would have lived a life fulfilled.

After 9 months, here are 5 things that I found to be true, at least for myself.

1. You don’t care what people think
You’re here alone. You’re on your own. You don’t care when you embarrass yourself. You don’t care how people will judge you when you do something wrong. You don’t care how people perceive you when you let your temper flare. You just speak your mind and do whatever you like, or what you think is right.

2. You pick up a new language
Whether intended or not, you will somehow learn the local language. You will pick up the local slangs and their accents, and you will start to talk like one of them.

3. You start dating new people
And then realize that cultural differences play a huge part in how all your new relationships don’t work out. People want very different things from a relationship, but once you start dating in Thailand, you have to throw away everything you know about dating and start learning the game all over again.

4. You get a little ethnocentric sometimes
Why do they do things this way? Why don’t they do it like how we always did it back home? And someone once asked me this, “Why do foreigners come to Thailand, only to change everything to how it’s like back in their own country?”